A study on interference effect in the recognition of musical pitch

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An auditory analogue of the Stroop effect was demonstrated in an experiment in which a musical-pitch naming task and a syllable-naming task were used. In each trial, a reference piano tone with fixed pitch of C was followed by a vocal test tone sung by a male or female singer. Pitch of the sung note was selected from the C major-diatonic scale and was either congruent or incongruent with the pronounced syllable. Participants with absolute pitch and those without absolute pitch named vocally the musical pitch (pitch task) or repeated the syllable (syllable task). In another series of experiments, participants identified the musical pitch or the syllable in the sung voice by pressing a corresponding key on the musical keyboard. As expected from the visual Stroop effect, the incongruent syllable name interfered with pitch identification, resulting in more errors and longer response times compared with the congruent condition. More interestingly, participants with absolute pitch showed the reverse effect in the syllable task ; the incongruent pitch interfered with syllable shadowing or keypressing. In contrast, participants with no absolute pitch showed no such interference. This result is consistent with the assumption that absolute-pitch possessors have developed strong and mandatory associations between pitch and its note name.